The dismissal in favor of Luc Besson will he be validated by the Court of Appeal of Paris. The court is studying this morning the order from which the filmmaker benefited on December 9. At that time, a Parisian investigating judge had followed the requisitions of the Paris prosecutor’s office and pronounced on December 9 the abandonment of the proceedings against Luc Besson accused of rape by the actress Sand Van Roy since May 2018.
In this emblematic case of the #MeToo era, Luc Besson, 63, disputes the charges against him. He was not indicted but only placed under the less incriminating status of assisted witness on January 25, 2021, after a long hearing.
Confirmation of the dismissal required by the prosecution
“We approach this audience with serenity. The public prosecutor’s office asked for confirmation of the dismissal, as before him the Paris public prosecutor’s office and the investigating judge, “said Me Thierry Marembert, the filmmaker’s lawyer. “The file sufficiently establishes that Ms. Sand Van Roy consented to the relationship she had with Mr. Besson”.
The plaintiff disputes, for a long time and point by point, the procedure carried out by the French justice, which she considers biased and incomplete and which “destroyed” her life.
Back to the case
The case started with the rape complaint filed on May 18, 2018 by the actress against the influential French producer and director after an appointment with him in a Parisian palace. Two months later, she had denounced other rapes and sexual assaults, committed according to her during two years of a “relationship of professional influence” with the one who is at the origin of the creation of the Cité du Cinéma. in the north of Paris. His complaints had been dismissed in February 2019 by the Paris prosecutor’s office, which considered that it had not been able to “characterize the offense denounced”.
The filmmaker and the actress had been confronted once, in December 2018, in the premises of the judicial police, during the preliminary investigation. “We could barely ask questions, we could not ask questions about my intimate wounds, and no difficult questions were asked of Mr. Besson”, had criticized Sand Van Roy.
The actress, who appears in “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” directed by Luc Besson, then filed a complaint with a civil action and obtained the opening of a judicial investigation in October 2019 for “rape”. During the investigation, no confrontation was organised. In October 2019, Luc Besson had indicated in an interview that he “(regretted) having had a relationship with this young girl when indeed there is a relationship of subordination”.